Strategy for Keeping the Robots at Bay

The Future of Work

A Strategy for Keeping the Robots at Bay

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by Matthew Lynn | WSJournal

Watch any old sci-fi movie, and the future is invariably depicted as a place full of helpful, hardworking robots, busying themselves with household chores while the humans sit around mixing cocktails and schmoozing. Funny, that world never seemed to materialize. If anything, we all seem to be working harder than ever, tightly bound to our smartphones and email.

But tomorrow may finally be upon us. Major advances in artificial intelligence are arriving so rapidly that robots may soon be a part of everyday life. Google is working hard on its driverless car. Samsung has launched a robotic vacuum. Other robots and machines are learning how to perform simple surgical operations, process basic legal documents, teach people how to speak a foreign language and even write news articles (although not nearly as well as humans, I hasten to add).

In a new book called "Robot Futures," Illah Reza Nourbakhsh, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, imagines a day when machines perform whole categories of traditional human jobs. And that will include "knowledge work," according to a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute. How fast all of this will happen remains to be seen. Technologies do not always advance as quickly as their more enthusiastic proponents expect. Still, it is clear that the rapid loss of manufacturing jobs in all developed economies isn't just owing to competition from cheaper workers in China. Robots simply have taken over many factory tasks. They're more reliable, don't ask for pay raises and don't second-guess the boss. It can happen in service jobs as well.

—Matthew Lynn, a financial journalist based in London, is the author of "Bust: Greece, the Euro and the Sovereign Debt Crisis."

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